No serial killer has ever had a moniker as underwhelming as the Doodler, which sounds like the name of a clownish Captain Underpants sidekick or a goofy Homer Simpson alter-ego. Nonetheless, the Doodler was no cartoon or laughing matter, killing at least five men—and perhaps as many as 16—in San Francisco between January 1974 and September 1975. Thanks to the particular time and place in which he operated, the Doodler escaped local and national front-page headlines, and to this day he remains at large. As a result, San Francisco Chronicle reporter Kevin Fagan’s new podcast The Doodler is not only a look into the past—it’s a work of investigative journalism aimed at uncovering new leads that might lead to the villain’s capture.
Available now, The Doodler is an eight-episode audio affair hosted and reported by the charming Fagan, a 28-year veteran of the San Francisco Chronicle who’s covered everything from the Zodiac killer to the Unabomber, and who states at the outset, “I care about the forgotten and the marginalized people at the heart of this city. And there’s one case, one unsolved case, that still angers me. It confounds me.” That would be the Doodler, a mysterious fiend who terrorized San Francisco in the mid-1970s in and around the Tenderloin, Polk Gulch, and the Castro. His targets were the metro area’s white gay men, whom he apparently met at well-known bars, or at cruising spots, and whom he lured into his clutches with a unique method: he would sit and sketch them beforehand, and then use those drawings as an introductory come-on before stabbing and slashing them 15-20 times with a blade. He was a murderer who used art to ensnare.
According to Fagan, there are two related reasons why the Doodler is not a true-crime legend. First, there was simply a lot of scary stuff going on in San Francisco at the time, thanks to the Zodiac’s slayings and attendant taunting letters to the media, as well as the series of fatal Zebra shootings in which unrelated everyday citizens were targeted, and which were eventually pinned on a group of African American men. The Doodler had competition when it came to sensationalistic homicides, and unlike his compatriots, he didn’t seek the spotlight. He left his victims’ bodies at Ocean Beach or at nearby Spreckels Lake, where they weren’t immediately visible to the public. The Doodler didn’t court cat-and-mouse notoriety, which made him a far less sexy monster on which to report.
Even more central to the Doodler’s low profile, however, was that he preyed upon a gay community that, in that era, was hardly a priority to the press or the police. The Doodler does an excellent job contextualizing its story in a 1970s San Francisco where—despite its thriving population of queer men and women—homosexuality was still criminalized. There were laws on the books mandating gender-appropriate clothing, outlawing sodomy, and penalizing anyone engaged in lewd and lascivious behavior—the last of which could amount to two men holding hands on the street. In this climate of institutionalized prejudice, when intolerance was baked into the legal system and the national consciousness, a collection of random dead gay men registered as merely a blip to most.
Fagan’s quest proves that times are different now, but The Doodler makes clear that 1970s society’s general disregard for the serial killer’s spree not only allowed him to get away then, but makes it especially difficult to identify—and potentially catch—him now. Fagan’s goal is to bring this story to light as a means of unearthing new clues, such that he provides a phone number in each episode that listeners can call if they have any pertinent information that might further his research. His mission runs parallel to that of San Francisco Police Department detective Dan Cunningham, who’s recently reopened the cold Doodler case, and who visits many of the killer’s crime scenes alongside Fagan during the course of the podcast—even as he remains somewhat reluctant to divulge all of his evidence, given that his investigation is now officially open.
The Doodler thus generates tension from the fact that Fagan is working with Cunningham while simultaneously carrying on his own inquiry, the latter of which is aided by his longtime Chronicle colleague Michael Taylor. There’s humor to be had from Taylor’s evident displeasure with being recorded for broadcast, although his participation is vital to the series, since he routinely does the sort of deep-dive sleuthing that turns up long-lost family members and acquaintances of the Doodler’s victims, who—be it single Canadian furniture finisher Gerald Cavanaugh, talented drag queen Joseph “Jae” Stevens, or Swedish immigrant Harald Gullberg—lived much of their lives in the shadows due to the discrimination gay men routinely faced. Fagan and Taylor are an amusing pair, and their efforts provide a real-time view of arduous, bit-by-bit journalistic toil.
When two men—one a well-known actor in the closet, the other a foreign diplomat—reportedly escaped run-ins with the Doodler, a composite sketch of the perpetrator was made, although The Doodler elucidates the ironic pitfalls of relying on such eyewitness-created drawings for accurate identification. The problem that Fagan and company face is that no one knows much about the killer, other than that he was possibly a young, tall, slender African American male who killed gay men, either out of homophobic hatred or self-loathing stemming from his own homosexuality. Through copious conversations with relatives, friends, SFPD officers and area residents, Fagan provides plenty of speculation rooted in fact and logical reasoning. It’s still speculation, however, which is why The Doodler is designed as a call for assistance as much as a definitive account.
Fagan is a likable guide through this sordid tale, and perhaps his greatest triumph with The Doodler is his portrait of the five victims most often attributed to the killer, whose trials and tribulations he brings to life with a vividness that also extends to his snapshot of SFPD detectives Rotea Gilford and Earl Sanders, the superstar African American cops who hunted the Doodler during the ‘70s. What Fagan’s podcast lacks in conclusive answers it makes up for with intriguing suppositions and a wealth of fascinating personalities.
